People who consider animals are lower beings than humans are called Speciesist, a term equal of Racist. Speciesist consider humans, no matter what humans, whether normally functioning or brain-dead, as higher beings than animals. This irrational position is equal to Racism where one race of people considers other inferior simply because it is different. As an example, I used a brain-dead human being, who is no different, well actually of lesser intellect and purpose than any kind of animal, yet is considered a higher being merely because it is human.

If people don't find it unethical to kill and eat animals, then I guess they won't find anything unethical about killing and eating brain-dead or retarded humans. We should just send them straight to the slaughter houses. I mean, no one wants to be hypocrite and a supremacist, right?

OK, here's a dilemma for you guys. It's winter, you walk past a frozen lake and you spot something in it. It's a man and a dog who've breached through the ice and cannot get out. You decide to act, but you can only save one. You have to drag one of them up and bring them to land where it's safe, and there's not enough time to go back for the other. You don't know the man, you don't know the dog and they don't know each other either. This means that you only choose who to save from your own ethical values. Who lives and who dies?

That's quite an unrealistic question, don't you think? Reality doesn't make such conditions like you can save one and not the other. Situation will show the outcome.

But if you were in some crazy twisted game in a room with a psycho who gives you an option who to save, that is up to you: who do you like on the first impression, whether you like humans or dogs more, whether you make a bold plan to take down the psycho before he kills them, or just let him kill them both, or just go eeny meeny miney moe. That depends on you and the situation.

About Rickardspaghetti's question I'd save the human first. Delopdephius it's quite possible for this to happen. Also, it'd be different to die by drowning/hypothermia with hope of being saved than being murdered by a psycho, who will feel more remorse, in some painful way.

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This isn't equatable at all. The differences between human "races" (a term which has little scientific validity) are entirely cosmetic, whereas there are vast differences in intellect and physiology between humans and other species. Cows, pigs and chickens aren't hominids; how can they even be on the same level as other apes?

This isn't equatable at all. The differences between human "races" (a term which has little scientific validity) are entirely cosmetic, whereas there are vast differences in intellect and physiology between humans and other species. Cows, pigs and chickens aren't hominids; how can they even be on the same level as other apes?

In the Juedo-Muslim-Christian worldview, animals can not sin. Only humans have free will to sin, so animals are truly innocent.

This isn't equatable at all. The differences between human "races" (a term which has little scientific validity) are entirely cosmetic, whereas there are vast differences in intellect and physiology between humans and other species.

Tell that to the Nazis.

"As far as animals are concerned, every human is a Nazi; for the animals, their entire history with humans is one eternal Treblinka."